Lib Dem MP David Ward's grotesque caricature of Israel and 'the Jews' is all too common on the liberal Left

The Liberal Democrats are considering whether to withdraw the whip from David Ward, MP for Bradford East, after he seemed to compare the murder of six million Jews to the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in the run up to Holocaust Memorial Day. He made the comparison on his website yesterday:

Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools – I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.

He later issued a statement in which he attempted to "clarify" this:

The Holocaust was one of the worst examples in history of man’s inhumanity to man. When faced with examples of atrocious behaviour, we must learn from them. It appears that the suffering by the Jews has not transformed their views on how others should be treated.

Both of these statements are so offensive I hope he does lose the whip. But had Ward expressed himself more delicately and confined his remarks to Israel rather than "the Jews", I doubt his career would be in any danger. The truth is that many people on the liberal Left believe there's something morally abhorrent about the state of Israel and often draw parallels between Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and the Nazis' treatment of the Jews.

A case in point is the Left-wing playwright Caryl Churchill, whose 'Seven Jewish Children' was performed at the Royal Court in 2011. Described by Howard Jacobson as "a hate-filled little chamber piece", this play makes a direct analogy between the systematic and deliberate murder of hundreds of thousands of Jewish children by the Nazis and the accidental death of Palestinian children at the hands of the Israeli Defence Force. "Tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? Tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her," says one of the Israeli characters.

Sometimes this analogy is disguised, with apartheid-era South Africa standing in for Nazi Germany. Thus Daniel Levy, a Left-wing political commentator, wrote an article in Foreign Policy last week predicting that the victors in the Israeli elections would be the hard Right. "This election will likely mark an acceleration of Israel’s long-predicted … journey toward a hegemonic nationalism resembling apartheid-era South Africa," he wrote.

In fact, as the Middle East expert Tom Gross pointed out, nothing of the kind happened. "There were 32 parties on the ballot," he wrote. "Twelve parties or party-blocs gained seats in the new 120-seat Knesset. Almost every shade of opinion is represented in the new Knesset. The Communists got four seats, the Islamists five, and the Arab nationalists three."

The New York Times predicted that voter turnout among Israeli Arabs would fall to below 50 per cent – after all, what else would you expect, given their status as second-class citizens? In fact, voter turnout was almost 80 per cent in the Israeli Arab city of Sakhnin compared to 68 per cent in the country as a whole. The big winner in last week's election was Yair Lapid, a moderate.

So much for the portrait of Israel as an ultra-nationalist, hard Right state that, in its treatment of Palestinians, resembles South Africa at the height of apartheid (i.e. Nazi Germany). Judging from last week's election results, it's more like Sweden.

But the worst offender when it comes to making this spurious, "moral equivalence" argument is George Galloway. "Today, the Palestinian people in Gaza are the new Warsaw Ghetto, and those who are murdering them are the equivalent of those who murdered the Jews in Warsaw in 1943," he said at a Stop Gaza Massacre rally in 2009.

The sheer idiocy of this position – its grotesque moral insensitivity – shouldn't need pointing out. But in case you haven't quite grasped just how offensive it is, here's Howard Jacobson writing in the Independent:

In the early 1940s some 100,000 Jews and Romanis died of engineered starvation and disease in the Warsaw Ghetto, another quarter of a million were transported to the death camps, and when the Ghetto rose up it was liquidated, the last 50,000 residents being either shot on the spot or sent to be murdered more hygienically in Treblinka. Don’t mistake me: every Palestinian killed in Gaza is a Palestinian too many, but there is not the remotest similarity, either in intention or in deed – even in the most grossly misreported deed – between Gaza and Warsaw.

* This is not a freedom of speech issue. I don't think David Ward should be pilloried for making these remarks and if he was a Guardian journalist, rather than an MP, I wouldn't have raised an eyebrow. (See CiF Watch for almost daily examples of the Guardian's anti-Semitism.) But if you represent a political party in Parliament, that party is entitled to disassociate itself from you if you express views it finds abhorrent.